The gig economy works because these costs are ignored. How many Uber drivers have commercial insurance? If they don't have commercial insurance, does their insurance company cover the damages (including medical bills of passengers) in the case of an accident while the vehicle is in commercial use?
Or, what is the Air BnB host's personal liability in the case that Air BnB requires hosts to refund bookings cancelled due to COVID? A hotel is a corporation, as an Air-BnB host do you have similar limitation on personal financial liability?
The gig economy is supply-and-demand combined with dodging regulatory costs.
Which is great until you run into the situation the regulation is designed to protect against.
So maybe not benign consequences as much as perceived risk. The problem is, my perception of risk is not always accurate.
i'd even go so far as to argue law to be the least "technical" profession (in the sense of having specialized knowledge) of those options--you mainly need to know how to construct a good argument and deconstruct bad ones (most law education seems to be learning a canon of past cases and rationales so you'd be better prepared for that. and writing a lot.).
To me it sounds like an entire profession created a monopoly on what they are doing to artificially keep out "amateurs".
Representatives in matters of disputes would always have a purpose but only a codified law with its complexities would create lawyers.
They like doctors also occupy the "high stakes license" version. Combined with incompetence of council as a reason for appeal it is easy to see why the state and others would have a valid interest in quality standards.
Small stakes courts are often still done lawyerless for instance.
lawyerly technical skills, as i see it, is the different ways of constructing, destructing, and rebutting arguments, along with presentational skills (verbal and written) and related strategies. so i see filling out forms and drawing up contracts as a form of argumentation--in that case, the preemption of common and likely future arguments. so then, lawyerly technical skills are relatively enumerable.
on the other hand, law has a vast corpus of knowledge (e.g., precedent) that no one person can master in a lifetime.
in contrast, the technical skills to imagine and create physical (and virtual) objects, or to understand and modify biological systems, are vast and relatively innumerable (as is what's known and unknown in those realms).
that's not to say anything about the intelligence or creativity of practitioners of any of these professions, as they all benefit from those qualities.
What about self taught people, don't they count as "amateur" in some way?
I believe it's mostly to allow experienced paralegals and law enforcement a path to lawyerhood, not to allow the broader masses of citizens into the profession.
On the other hand, it's relatively easy to learn a slice of health care or law enough to be able to give advice. As for engineering... try combinations including the word "redneck" on youtube search and enjoy yourself.
A huge number of the people who program things like their raspberry pi or open source projects are amateur programmers. Or all the students and dabblers.
Same goes for engineering in general, if you spend any amount of time in a rural area you'll stumble on some amateur engineering genius.
Not yet!
> amateurization is correlated with benign consequences for being wrong
Not that simple I think. it's correlated with either (1) as you say, not so bad consequences for being wrong, (2) being able to quickly check/measure both an individual's actual skill and the possible consequence of their decision before implementing thee, or (3) "rollback"/undo-ability - if something wrong happens, there's a relatively cheap way to undo the consequences and try again a different thing.
You can't easily measure skills in medicine or law (you can't create simple and fast tests/exams yet for such areas). You can't really simulate either by running a mental experiment or by running some software the consequences of decisions in medicine or law. You can try but it will fail horribly most of the time. And there's no "undo" after someone dies or stays wrongly in jail for X years.
I think that, paradoxically, as fields get more technical and precise, they will become more open to amateurization, because skills will be easily assessable and outcomes predicatable before deploying a scenario in the real world.
Of course, this will happen concurrently with AI/ML-replacing humans in these areas, so the amateurization if it will ever have time to happen will probably be a footnote in history, dwarfed by the bigger story of mostly getting humans out-of-the-loop...
But the humans that will remain in the loop will likely be more and more expert-generalists, eg. the "platinum level" version of "amateurs"!